I didn’t know it yet, but my life was about to end.
My wife was in the doctor’s office getting that scan where you find out the sex of your kid.
I was out in the hallway shouting in joy because I had made a million dollars.
I didn’t care about anything. Sex of baby. Buying a house. Flying a helicopter to play poker. Getting another house on the beach. Buying art. Heck, my 0-year-old baby had a two-story bedroom in the middle of Manhattan.
I didn’t care about any of that. I only wanted to make more money.
And then when Internet stocks started to collapse, I doubled down and then tripled down.
I kept buying more and more stocks. I mortgaged my apartment. I borrowed.
Then the dotcom bubble burst.
I lost everything.
I had nothing left but a salary I was getting from a venture capital fund that I started.
So I borrowed against my house again. Why not? My wife said, “Are you sure about this? This is our last money!”
And I said, “Don’t you believe in me?”
I saw about ten psychiatrists during that time. None helped. I started to meditate. Instead of calm meditation it was violent “mad attention”. Nothing could shut off my panic and fear.
This patent, filed by Elon Musk’s team…
Promises to turn the entire AI industry on its head. And in the process, change everything about the way we shop… travel… and earn a living.
With Bill Gates saying “the ramifications for society will be profound”…
And with Musk aiming to release this technology to the public as soon June 30th…
It’s time to get clued up ASAP.
Informed investors into the ONE company at the centre of this tech have a shot out-sized returns.
Click here for the urgent details.
Capital at risk. Forecasts are not a reliable indicator of future results.
From dead money to 10x winners
I gave up on stocks.
Instead, I decided to learn. Here’s what I did, step by step to escape the stock market carnage and find a different path.
I read about 200-300 books on markets and investing. History, biographies, strategies, contrarian views, accounting, economic history, and psychology.
Reading 200+ books was just the ignition. Then I had to drive.
I wrote software to find patterns in market data. I found hundreds of patterns that seemed to create statistically significant trades that worked.
I talked to everyone I could – mentors like Victor Niederhoffer and Jim Cramer. I joined investment groups to learn what everyone else was doing.
I started writing for TheStreet and The Financial Times, which connected me with hundreds of investors.
I wrote books that forced me to refine my investment strategies.
Then I started making money in stocks again.
But also: I started looking outside the conventional stock market for returns.
Yes, you can make insane money in stocks. But I learned that’s not the only place you can make money. And, in fact, the richest people I know don’t rely only on stocks to build wealth.
How to build extreme wealth outside the stock market
The ultimate purpose of the financial markets, ever since the first trade ships were funded to go to the Spice Islands, is to fund innovation and exploration.
Every idea that moves the world forward seemed crazy the day before it became genius.
It was crazy to cross the Atlantic. It was crazy to take a bicycle and put wings on it to fly in the air. It was crazy to inject people with dead diseases to protect them from future diseases.
Maybe it’s crazy to go to Mars in a flying car. Or to live life forever in a virtual reality that is better than this reality.
Who knows?
At this point, all I know is: I’m stupid. I try to be a blank slate every day. I’m open to anything. I’m willing to explore and learn. And that’s exactly why I don’t rely on stocks alone to build wealth anymore.
Because if there’s one thing I learned from losing everything – and clawing my way back – it’s this:
The biggest returns often come from the places no one’s looking yet.
I’ve found that true wealth – the kind that doesn’t vanish overnight – comes from positioning yourself early in new markets, new technologies, and undiscovered assets with asymmetric upside.
That’s why I’ve been tracking a much bigger story unfolding beneath the surface right now.
It’s not about a trend. It’s not about stocks. It’s about a once-obscure company quietly sitting at the center of a $29 trillion shift… tied to what may soon become the most valuable app ever created.
It’s the kind of setup I would’ve missed years ago, back when I only focused on stocks and headlines.
But now? I know better.
This opportunity could hand early movers a monopoly-like advantage before Wall Street even knows what it is.
Click here to see why I’m putting this on my radar – and why you might want to, too.
Because the next big wave of wealth isn’t found by doing what everyone else is doing.
It’s found by seeing the future just a little earlier and being brave enough to move.
More from me soon,
James Altucher
Contributing Editor, Investor’s Daily
Chaos
Bill Bonner, from aboard the Queen Mary II
Tariffs, tariffs everywhere…
What a rollicking good time for the press. And for Trump critics. The wires:
Stocks slide around the world as investors recoil from Trump’s tariffs
We watched the tape on Thursday. The Dow was down 1,000… then 1,200… then 1,500. Where would it come to rest, we wondered. It ended the day down 1,679.
In his first term, Trump committed one of the biggest blunders in US economic history – shutting down the economy and replacing real output with an extra $4 trillion in phony, printed-up stimmy checks.
The result? The worst inflation in fifty years.
And now… here comes Big Blunder No. 2. Doubters overseas and skeptics at home – all are having a field day. Raw Story:
“This might be the single stupidest thing any of us will ever see,” [Ian] Dunt argued. “It is stupid in every way: presentationally, intellectually, politically, methodologically, morally and of course economically. The word stupid doesn’t really suffice for the full level of idiocy we’ve now reached.”
Trump’s tariffs are so dumb they are uniting Democrats and Republicans… free traders and protectionists… comedians and historians. Alternet:
Shortly after President Donald Trump issued Wednesday’s announcement of new tariffs, four Senate Republicans joined Democrats to extend a lopsided bipartisan rebuke to his trade policy. The Senate adopted a resolution by a 51 to 48 vote to block his proposed tariffs on imports from Canada, a longtime US ally. Now, former Vice President Mike Pence is further infuriating Trump supporters by calling out his new tariffs as “a tax.”
The tariffs are even making economists look smart. Finally, here is something that Paul Krugman – famously wrong about most everything – can be right about. Raw Story:
“Based on what he said, he’s gone full-on crazy,” wrote Krugman, a frequent critic of the president. “It’s not just that he appears to be imposing much higher tariffs than almost anyone expected. He’s also making false claims about our trading partners — not sure in this case whether they’re lies, because he may be truly ignorant — that will both enrage them and make it very hard to back down. Basically, he’s claiming that the rest of the world is placing very high tariffs on U.S. products, and that he’s imposing ‘reciprocal’ tariffs that are only half what they impose on us.”
“The EU, like the United States, has generally low tariffs; the average tariff it charges on US goods is less than 3 percent,” wrote Krugman. “So where does this 39 percent number come from? I have no idea. Many people speculated that Trump would count value-added taxes as tariffs, even though they aren’t — European producers selling to the EU market pay the same VAT as US producers, so it doesn’t discriminate and therefore isn’t protectionist. But even if you get that wrong, EU VAT rates are in the vicinity of 20 percent, so you still can’t get anywhere close to 39 percent.”
Where do Trump’s numbers come from? Some are nonsense. Some are irrelevant. Some are pure WTF. The Donald, for example, says Taiwan should get a 64% tariff.
On a total of $134 billion of back-and-forth trade in 2023, tariffs on imports and exports averaged 2% – even steven, coming and going. So, why a penalty tariff on our supposed ally?
Trump:
“We are going to charge countries for doing business in our country and taking our jobs, taking our wealth, taking a lot of things that they have been taking over the years.”
Business Insider:
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said on Wednesday that President Donald Trump’s new reciprocal tariffs are just a response to how the US has been treated on trade.
Laura Ingraham at Fox picks up the fight club angle. “Only Trump has the guts” to stop the foreigners from ripping us off, she says.
Get it? They’re Honor Tariffs… like honor killings, designed to reclaim America’s sense of fairness… justice… and honor. We’re going to teach them a lesson by imposing taxes – on ourselves!
Because, the foreigners don’t pay the tariff penalties. US consumers do.
Warren Buffett explains:
“The Tooth Fairy doesn’t pay ’em!”
And why are the feds getting involved at all?
Donald Trump is the ultimate politician… always fighting for power, prestige, and money. That’s why he insists upon being a ‘winner.’ In politics, you are either a winner or a victim. Now, he thinks he can win by bludgeoning other nations with tariffs.
But trade is not meant to be part of the political world. It’s part of the win-win world of commerce – bargaining, negotiating, and trying to satisfy a customer.
When an honest trade happens, both sides win. Each gets something he didn’t have before and gives up something he considers less valuable. Bringing in politics just queers the deal.
And now that the politicians are on the case, you can expect them to make the same sort of mess of it that they made of Amtrak, Iraq, and the Covid hysteria. Expect lower growth, higher prices, and more chaos.
Regards,
Bill Bonner
Contributing Editor, Investor’s Daily
For more from Bill Bonner, visit www.bonnerprivateresearch.com
